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Windows badly needs this to be a general Development OS. Lot's of developers in the last years run away from Windows to OSX and Linux because of this. Without

Windows badly needs this to be a general Development OS. Lot's of developers in the last years run away from Windows to OSX and Linux because of this. Without Visual Studio, which installs the C++ and .Net dev env, it's a pain to install anything which works out of the box in Windows. Example: Perl or Python both have an installer but you have to update the system PATH, the console sucks so you can never use it, no simple way to keep it update unless you use the installer again and so on... If all these goodies are available in a "unixy away" i'm sure Windows will be used by general Developers.

theandrewbailey 11y ago
> Without Visual Studio, which installs the C++ and .Net dev env, it's a pain to install anything which works out of the box in Windows. Depends on what you're working with. I don't have VS on my Windows machine at home, but everything tends to work out of the box. Granted, I see plenty of installers with the VS Runtime redistributable, but that's not proper VS.
k-mcgrady 11y ago
>> "Without Visual Studio, which installs the C++ and .Net dev env, it's a pain to install anything which works out of the box in Windows." On Mac don't you need to installed the Xcode command line tools before being able to do most dev stuff?
- evilduck 11y ago
  That's the easiest way, but not the only way. Likewise, on Ubuntu you also often need build-essentials and various other dev libs manually installed.
  - lmedinas 11y ago
    Do we really want to compare "sudo apt-get install build-essentials" with installing all VS, Perl,Python etc... in Windows ? :)
    - recursive 11y ago
      Well, in some ways it's worse. I'm not too familiar with linux, but a year or two ago, I was trying to set up a rails development environment on a Ubuntu VM. I had quite a few challenges along the way, but one of them that I recall that confounded me for an hour or so was that I needed to install build-essentials, which was not documented in the guide I was using, nor was it marked as a dependency in whatever package I was actually trying to install. When you install Visual Studio, generally it automatically installs anything you're missing, or at least tells you how to do it.
- mrpippy 11y ago
  Which can be done by running 'clang' from a terminal. And if you want the full Xcode, install from the App Store with just an Apple ID needed, again for free.
hn_ 11y ago
I am a Java dev and don't use VS and things basically work "out of the box" for me. I used to be a big "Linux is the best dev env" kinda person but I've changed my mind since I started doing Window's development - it really is just as easy - for the stuff I do.

theandrewbailey 11y ago

> Without Visual Studio, which installs the C++ and .Net dev env, it's a pain to install anything which works out of the box in Windows. Depends on what you're working with. I don't have VS on my Windows machine at home, but everything tends to work out of the box. Granted, I see plenty of installers with the VS Runtime redistributable, but that's not proper VS.

k-mcgrady 11y ago

>> "Without Visual Studio, which installs the C++ and .Net dev env, it's a pain to install anything which works out of the box in Windows." On Mac don't you need to installed the Xcode command line tools before being able to do most dev stuff?

evilduck 11y ago
That's the easiest way, but not the only way. Likewise, on Ubuntu you also often need build-essentials and various other dev libs manually installed.
- lmedinas 11y ago
  Do we really want to compare "sudo apt-get install build-essentials" with installing all VS, Perl,Python etc... in Windows ? :)
  - recursive 11y ago
    Well, in some ways it's worse. I'm not too familiar with linux, but a year or two ago, I was trying to set up a rails development environment on a Ubuntu VM. I had quite a few challenges along the way, but one of them that I recall that confounded me for an hour or so was that I needed to install build-essentials, which was not documented in the guide I was using, nor was it marked as a dependency in whatever package I was actually trying to install. When you install Visual Studio, generally it automatically installs anything you're missing, or at least tells you how to do it.
mrpippy 11y ago
Which can be done by running 'clang' from a terminal. And if you want the full Xcode, install from the App Store with just an Apple ID needed, again for free.

hn_ 11y ago

I am a Java dev and don't use VS and things basically work "out of the box" for me. I used to be a big "Linux is the best dev env" kinda person but I've changed my mind since I started doing Window's development - it really is just as easy - for the stuff I do.